At 22:51 1/2/96, Steve Gibbons wrote:
I had a similar thought about a month ago. In particular, I was thinking that skyrise office buildings would be a great market for ISPs to target. Rent a closet in the basement/top floor close to the telco demarc. Run lots of UTP to the cients through the existing conduit, ceiling acces, air ducts, or whatever and boom, lots of clients, low overhead, telco bills cut to 1/2 of the competitions'. Up-front costs might (or might not be) higher, since the wire installation would now be the burden of the ISP. [...] FWIW, (and if anyone winds up doing something like this, I want a "finders fee" ;-) )
Sorry, I thought of this months ago :-) But there is an even better business opportunity out there. Wireless T1 service covering a whole downtown area. I speced the whole system for the last company I worked for before they ran out of money. My calculations show that you can deliver close to T1 speed to corporate customers at fraction of the cost using land lines. In the best case scenario, you can produce the individual connection at below $200. No land line based ISP can ever touch that. The total cost for a land line based IPS is at least $395/T1. Set-up fee is lower too. Best, the whole thing can be set up self financing. If I wasn't so busy with other projects, I'd implement it myself. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.